Netflix’s Most Viewed Film: Uncovering the Secret

r those with Korean heritage, including its Korean-Canadian co-director Maggie Kang, and is based on heroes and monsters from the peninsula’s mythology. It is the latest example of the ways that, despite barriers of language, South Korean culture has internationalized since the 2010s.

It all started with Psy’s 2012 song Gangnam Style, which has been watched 5.7 billion times on YouTube. A few years later, the boy band BTS began filling stadiums in Europe, North America, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Having completed their compulsory military service, the seven members of BTS have reunited and are gearing up to release a new album and embark on a world tour next spring. Meanwhile, girl groups like Blackpink and a new generation of boy bands like BigBang are thriving both nationally and internationally. Groups like Seventeen and Tomorrow X Together have matched BTS’s record for a Korean band of seven No. 1 albums in the United States.

South Korean novelist Han Kang won the international Booker Prize for Fiction in 2016 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024. In 2020, the film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho, won the Oscar for Best Picture, the first non-English language film to do so.

The success of KPop Demon Hunters and other South Korean cultural exports has led to a significant increase in the value of exports of South Korean “intellectual property”, including music, films, television, and games, which more than tripled over ten years to $9.85 billion in 2024. The newly elected president of South Korea, Lee Jae-myung, aims to generate $36 billion by 2030 from exports of music, dramas, webtoons, beauty products, and food.

“We can’t just leave it up to individual companies,” President Lee said. “The government will play the role of laying a strong foundation and it starts now.”

It’s clear that the South Korean cultural wave is here to stay, as KPop Demon Hunters and other products of Hallyu continue to captivate audiences around the world. With streaming numbers soaring, fans dancing in cinemas, and international accolades piling up, South Korea has firmly established itself as a powerhouse in the global entertainment industry.